The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

Books about cities tend to be polemics. An author decides what's right and wrong about how we live, then marshals anecdotes and rhetoric to buttress the case.

There's another way to approach the topic: in person and on foot, following one's instincts but open to nuance along the way. Alan Ehrenhalt follows that path, to our benefit, in his new book "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City." Readers tag along to such locales as Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Denver as the author explores how these metropolises, so different at first glance, are being reshaped by very similar urges and trends.

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"The truth is that we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end," argues Ehrenhalt, the editor of Governing magazine from 1990 to 2009. "And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result."

Ehrenhalt doesn't claim that traditional suburbia is on the brink of extinction, that cul de sacs will go the way of milkmen. His premise is more grounded: A growing number of Americans are drawn to urbanized locales, at least for some portion of their lives, and "the inhabitants of the center cities of the twenty-first century will be largely those with money - those who have the greatest choice about where to live."

This is old news in today's Bay Area, where the desirability of such San Francisco neighborhoods as Bernal Heights or Glen Park would bewilder the families who left en masse 40 years ago seeking warm weather, reliable schools and a car-friendly way of life. But Ehrenhalt makes a convincing case that "the center" has taken on a magnetic appeal even in the most stereotypically splayed-out American metropolises.

Consider Houston. It's the land that zoning forgot, the largest city in the state that gave us Rick Perry and Tom DeLay. It's also where industrial land behind the convention center is being recast as EaDo, for East Downtown, and sprouting townhouses for upscale residents. Where sales brochures for a suburb dubbed Sugar Land boast of "an increasingly urban atmosphere." Where a 65-station light-rail line is set to open by 2015.

An equally startling example is Phoenix, a city that "never possessed a center in the first place." There's no possibility of a loft district emerging, since the small stock of blue-collar buildings runs to Quonset huts rather than masonry warehouses. But a light-rail line opened in 2008, and a developer has fashioned a lucrative niche in five-story buildings with housing above commercial space. While a handful of recent ultra-lux towers nearby are mostly empty, these buildings aimed at younger professionals are full.

"The Great Inversion" also visits such places as Lower Manhattan, where, despite 9/11, 60,000 people now live and every building on the south side of Wall Street has been converted to residential use except the New York Stock Exchange.

It is a "remarkable transformation," Ehrenhalt writes, and if he were merely an advocate he would stop there. Instead, he also describes "an imperfect transformation," where basic retail services have dwindled even as the population has grown, felled in part by high rents. Similarly, on a foray to Denver he visits failed mall sites that have been remade as suburbs and is impressed - but notes that they "are drops in the bucket" compared with the old-school tracts that remain.

That's the strength of the book: Ehrenhalt's sympathies are with movements like new urbanism and smart growth, but these sympathies don't blur his sharp eye for details or the wry clarity of his prose.

He even includes a caveat: "One thing we have learned about the modern city is that even the smartest of observers, trying to predict the possibilities for revival and change in almost any urban neighborhood, are likely to be wrong." In this case, though, I'm betting that time proves Ehrenhalt right.